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Friday, January 18, 2008

Anthropocentricity means that life is at the center of the cause and reason for the existence of this Universe. That is a difficult and somewhat anomalous concept to grasp. What this says is that in effect we have made this Universe and therefore we have made ourselves. Well, yes and no, (again I vacillate).

I once wrote a poem about it. Just recently I was selected by The International Library of Poetry to become "United States of America 2007 Poetry Ambassador". Never mind that I hold a Canadian passport. The closest I ever came to living in the U.S. was the result of a compulsion to wander around Manhattan for three days back in '79. I stayed at the 84th street YMCA for two nights for $12.00. Anyway, here's the poem that did it..

The Premonition

The day would come when I could answer thusWhen someone asks me what is all the fuss?What of one's inner self and outer spaceAnd all those particles and of their place?What puts the conscious mind above it all?What piques my interest or makes it fall?Why is it I can only reach so far,Yet place my thoughts so deep within a star?

This great exploding cosmic anthropy,Its part in universal history,Which at its edge unfurls itself and spaceAnd time, which matter orders into place;That random quantum fluctuating thingContinues ad infinitum to bringA reason to that notorietyOf notion which begets infinity.

As I see it, the manifestation of life as we know it is a predisposition to the consciousness which is really the root cause of creation, that which begets it all. For want of a better word, I use the term 'premonition', because a premonition does not require the function of time. In other words, we can say that the impact of that staggeringly awesome and profound idea that anything would exist sinks into being its very heavy and impressive counterweight to the nothing that predates it. For the more analytical types, a more plausible explanation: you could say that if we could have measured time before it happened, then trillions of eons to the power of trillions of eons might very well have passed before the laws of probability dictate that it does happen. The problem with that is that time did not exist until then. You see, it happens and that's it. The history of time begins with that initial non-random quantum fluctuation.

Carl Gustav Jung occasionally made reference to "the Universal Unconscious". He was inferring from the obvious and yet I wonder if he knew fully that of which his own subconscious mind was fully aware. He really meant "the Universal Conscious". Life is a predisposition to the consciousness which begets being. That is what Anthropocentricity is.

One might wonder why life didn't manifest into one giant, infinitely occurring conscious entity. There is an explanation for that. You see, our days are numbered. Our presence here is but a fleeting glimpse destined to unwind and unravel into the aether of timelessness because this great idea of existence is but a passing fancy. Granted, creation begins for perpetuity at the periphery and there will always be a Universe and life will always manifest as a predisposition to the consciousness which begets it all, but.. it passes by if you stay in one place too long.

Evolution is accelerating. It took two billion years for single-celled life with a few nucleotide sequences in them to evolve into eukaryotes, single-celled life with a nucleus. It took one and a half billion years for the eukaryote to evolve into the most primitive of multi-celled life, a microscopic bi-lateral life form with a mouth and an anus, now extinct. And, it took a mere six hundred and fifty million years for that most primitive multi-celled life to evolve into the diverse array of zoological specimens which thrive today, humans included. So you see, if life had become manifest as one giant infinitely occurring conscious entity it would have grown obsolete over time. Consciousness must manifest as finite, corporeal, sentient beings. We exist to rationalize existence. Our presence makes sense of it all.